Krugman’s blog, 5/24/13

There were three posts yesterday.  The first was “Obamacare Will Be A Debacle — For Republicans:”

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a policy Rube Goldberg device — instead of doing the simple, obvious thing, which would just be to insure everyone, it basically relies on a combination of regulations and subsidies to rope, coddle, and nudge us into a rough approximation of a single-payer system. There were reasons for this, of course, mainly political: a complete displacement of the existing system would have been both too destructive of powerful interests and too radical for voters.

Still, the question is whether this cobbled-together system will work, and there have been many conservatives rubbing their hands with glee over the prospect of failure.

Whoops.

We won’t really know how Obamacare works until it has been in operation for a while; but we do know that essentially the same system has been running in Massachusetts since 2006, and is doing pretty well. The question, then, is whether other states that don’t have MA’s initial advantages — especially an already low uninsurance rate and an already operating system of community rating — can make this thing work. The big fear has been of sharply rising premiums as insurers are required to cover people with preexisting conditions. And the biggest test case was always going to be California.

Well, the preliminary numbers for CA are in — and they’re looking very good, with costs coming in below expectations. At this point, it looks as if this thing is indeed going to work.

And think about the political dynamics. Because the Supreme Court decided to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion, some states — notably Texas — will have a pretty dysfunctional version of Obamacare in 2014, although even those systems will provide significant benefits to many people. Still, the whole political calculus was supposed to be that Republicans in red states could point to the horrors of Obamacare and ride them to political victory. Instead, it looks as if we’re going to see blue-state residents reaping the benefits of a functional health care system, while red-state residents are denied many of those benefits, for what looks like no better reason than mean-spirited spite — because what’s going on is, indeed, mean-spirited spite.

Predictions that Obamacare will be a big political issue are probably right — but not in the way gleeful conservatives imagined.

The second post of the day was “The Four Percent Solution:”

Larry Ball makes the case that we would be a lot better off with a 4 percent inflation target rather than the 2 percent that is now central bank orthodoxy. Intellectually, this position is hardly outlandish; indeed, Ball’s case is very similar to the case Olivier Blanchard made three years ago, just stated more forcefully and with more evidence.

The basic point is that a higher baseline for inflation would make liquidity traps, in which conventional monetary policy is up against the zero lower bound, less likely and less costly when they happen. Ball estimates that if we had come into this crisis with an underlying inflation rate of 4 percent, average unemployment over the past three years would have been two percentage points lower. That’s huge — it amounts to millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of extra output.

There are two main arguments against a higher inflation target. One is that events like the current crisis almost never happen. My view would be that the costs of this crisis are so large — and the difficulties we’ve had in responding so grotesque — that even if they were once-in-75-year events, that should be enough to warrant different policies. But Ball also argues that the risk of liquidity-trap events is much greater than conventional wisdom would have you believe. Just looking at US experience, the last three recessions were all “postmodern” recessions caused by private-sector overreach, not Fed tightening — and in each case the Fed had a very hard time getting traction. Both 1990-91 and 2001 were near misses in terms of the liquidity trap; 2007 onwards was actually in line with what had become the normal pattern, not a bizarre exception.

By the way, one point Ball doesn’t mention is that to the extent that we consider Japan’s issues partly demographic, that’s becoming the norm too: low fertility and, perhaps, low resulting investment returns are also becoming standard among advanced countries. Again, this calls for a higher inflation target.

The other argument is some kind of slippery slope thing: you decide that 4 percent is OK, and the next thing you know you’re Jimmy Carter, or maybe Weimar. As Ball says, there is really no evidence for this fear. It’s true that it’s what almost all central bankers believe; but they can’t really explain why, and we should never forget that there was once a time when almost all central bankers believed that going off the gold standard would mean the end of civilization.

The point is that the conventional 2 percent target is a prejudice, nothing more; it once rested to some extent on studies suggesting that 2 percent was enough to make the zero lower bound a non-problem, but we now know how utterly wrong that view was; so we’re left with a target that’s considered respectable because it’s what all the respectable people say, and is what all the respectable people say because it’s considered respectable.

What do we want? Four percent! When do we want it? Now!

Well, us olds don’t want that, since everyone on the Hill seems hell bent in instituting the chained CPI.  The last post of the day was “Friday Night Music:  Arcade Fire Does The Clash:”

No particular reason, but found this running through my head at the end of a crazy day. Some love it, some hate it; but the dedication and respect are something to watch.

Arcade Fire — The Guns of Brixton

 

Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “This Is Not 2009″ Mr. Blow says the emergence of a new economic picture has dampened the outrage.  Mr. Nocera looks at “Obama’s Gitmo Problem” and says it isn’t Congress’s fault that the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, hasn’t closed. It’s the president’s.  Ms. Collins has a question in “The Women Versus the Ted.”  She says the Senate seems a bit less polarized and more productive this session. She then asks:  Is that because there are more women in power or is it thanks to Ted Cruz?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

With the scent of scandal encircling the White House, some Republicans are already licking their chops over the 2014 midterm elections, while some Democrats are pre-emptively licking their wounds.

Not so fast, folks. Retract those tongues.

While it is impossible to predict what might drive voter attitudes in an election 18 months away, there are quite a few signs that 2014 will be nothing like 2010, which produced tremendous success for Republicans.

First, the electorate is less conservative.

In May 2009, the Tea Party had just begun to flex its muscle and feel its power on a national level. Now, the movement has lost momentum.

An April 2012 Associated Press report included a finding from Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor, that the number of Tea Party groups had fallen from about 1,000 to about 600. And a Washington Post/ABC News poll released this week found that the portion of people saying they strongly support the Tea Party, just 10 percent, was the lowest they had recorded since 2011.

Furthermore, according to a Gallup poll released Friday, the shares of Americans describing themselves as economic conservatives and social conservatives are down by more than a tenth since 2009, after having risen sharply following Barack Obama’s election a year earlier.

The portion of Republicans who said their position on economic issues was conservative — the Republican Trojan Horse for a retrograde social agenda — has seen little movement since 2009, dropping just five percentage points, from 75 percent to 70 percent.

(On the other hand, the share of Democrats who describe their positions on social issues as liberal has increased, from 45 percent to 50 percent.)

Speaking of economic issues, the economy is experiencing a resurgence, at least in some quarters.

In May 2009, the United States economy was nearing the end of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate had risen to 9.4 percent from 5.5 percent the previous year. People were losing their homes to foreclosures in record numbers. The Dow Jones industrial average had fallen to about 8,500 from more than 13,000 the previous May. And the deficit tripled from the 2008 fiscal year to the 2009 fiscal year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

This had Americans rightfully worried and near-panicked about their economic prospects.

Now the economic picture couldn’t be more different.

The unemployment rate has dropped to 7.5 percent. The Dow is above 15,000 and continuing to set records. The housing sector is rebounding — “Sales of previously owned homes reached the highest level in more than three years, with the share of foreclosure purchases shrinking, as the housing market continued its rebound last month,” according to a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal.

And the deficit is shrinking faster than expected, according to a report released last week by the budget office. The report found that if current laws are unchanged, “Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit this year — at 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.) — will be less than half as large as the shortfall in 2009, which was 10.1 percent of G.D.P.”

This takes almost all of the air out of the Republicans’ economic argument.

Lastly, legislative unease has become about what Republicans haven’t done, rather than what Democrats have done.

By May of 2009, President Obama had already signed the huge — though many still believe not huge enough — stimulus package, Chrysler and General Motors were in need of a bailout and the ball was rolling on the president’s historic health care law.

Conservatives were railing against what they saw as an unprecedented, ominous and ultimately ruinous expansion of government, driven by the president and made possible by a Congress controlled by Democrats.

Now, the tables have turned. Two of the most glaring legislative failures this year have ostensibly been the work of obstinate Republicans: the failure to avoid the sequester and the failure to pass expanded gun background checks legislation. According to that recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, most Americans still disapprove of the sequester’s automatic spending cuts, and according to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday, 81 percent of Americans still favor the passage of a bill expanding background checks.

The next hurdle will be immigration reform. But Republicans may find a way to derail that legislation, too.

The signs look positive for Democrats this spring. This is not to say that they should prematurely lift their glasses, only that they have no reason to prematurely throw up their hands.

Next up we have Mr. Nocera:

Late Wednesday afternoon, less than 24 hours before President Obama made his big national security speech — in which he said, for the umpteenth time, that the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should be closed — a group of American lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees filed an emergency motion with the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia. The motion asked the court to order the removal of “unjustified burdens” that the military command at Guantánamo has placed on the detainees, making it nearly impossible for them to meet with their lawyers.

Let me tell you about these new burdens, which were imposed in recent months, around the same time that the detainees’ desperate hunger strike was gaining momentum. Lawyers used to be able to easily get ahold of their clients on the telephone, or could visit them in Camp 5 or Camp 6, where the “no value” detainees have been confined for years. (The smaller group of genuine terrorists is held in separate quarters.)

Not anymore. Today, if a lawyer asks to speak with his or her client, a meeting — and even a phone call — must take place at another location. And before they are moved to the location, the detainees are searched for “contraband.” According to the legal filings, the search includes touching the genitals and the anus of the detainees — which, as the military well knows, violates the detainees’ Muslim faith and will cause them to refuse the meeting. If the detainee does decide to go forward with the meeting, he is then shackled hand and foot, and chained to the floor of a van, in a purposely painful, bent-over position.

The detainees are all in solitary confinement. They are shackled when they are taken to the shower. They cannot speak to their families unless they submit to that same repugnant body search. In other words, an already inhumane situation has become even worse on the watch of the president who claims to want to shut down the prison.

In his speech on Thursday, Obama hit all the right notes. He talked about how holding detainees for an indefinite period without charging them with any crime has made the prison “a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law.” He noted that it has hurt us with our allies. He even mentioned how absurdly expensive the prison is — nearly $1 million per prisoner per year. “Is this who we are?” he asked.

“History,” he concluded, “will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism.” He’s right about that. But he will hardly be immune from that judgment.

In his speech, Obama blamed the failure to close Guantánamo — which, please recall, was one of his most strident campaign promises five years ago — on laws passed by Congress. And, yes, after the failed terrorist attempt to blow up a flight headed to Detroit four years ago, Congress did pass laws making it more difficult to transfer detainees out of Guantánamo.

But Congress didn’t make it impossible. The president could have jumped through the hoops Congress now requires and continued moving prisoners out of Guantánamo. But he didn’t. Instead, he froze all transfers, including 56 men from Yemen who had been “cleared” for transfer by a national security commission that Obama himself established. The government, the commission essentially said, has no national security interest in holding these men. Yet Obama continued to let them rot in that Cuban hell. And you wonder why they are on a hunger strike?

Or, for that matter, why the military command at Guantánamo has no compunction about instituting punishing new “burdens” on the detainees even as their commander in chief decries what goes on there? (For the record, a military spokesman denies that the heightened searches include genital and anal touching.) Indeed, the current commander of the prison, Rear Adm. John W. Smith Jr., was just named to a cushy new post at the National Defense University. Thumbing one’s nose at Obama, as virtually everyone in Washington has learned by now, has no consequences.

It is my belief, shared by many lawyers who have followed the legal battles over Guantánamo, that the president could have shut down the prison if he had really been determined to do so. One reason innocent detainees can’t get out is that the courts have essentially ruled that a president has an absolute right to imprison anyone he wants during a time of war — with no second-guessing from either of the other two branches of government. By the same legal logic, a president can also free any prisoner in a time of war. Had the president taken that stance, there would undoubtedly have been a court fight. But so what? Aren’t some things worth fighting for?

Whenever he talks about Guantánamo, the president gives the impression that that’s what he believes. The shame — his shame — is that, for all his soaring rhetoric, he has yet to show that he is willing to act on that belief.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Let’s discuss how much better Congress would work if most of the members were women.

The Senate seems to be a tad less polarized since the female population rose from 17 to 20 this year. It’s also possible that there’s been more productivity since women got more power. For instance, the Budget Committee has a new chair, Patty Murray of Washington, and it has produced a budget for the first time in four years.

It’s conceivable that the committee was inspired by a rule that would have canceled the senators’ salaries if they didn’t deliver. But I’m hoping for a larger picture.

“Women tend to listen to what everybody’s needs are, rather than just saying: ‘I’m the only bright person in the world and you have to listen to what I say,’ ” suggested Murray in a phone conversation from her home state, where she was inspecting a spectacular bridge collapse. We will all stop here to envision the moment in the State of the Union address when President Obama called for more bridge repair projects and John Boehner failed to applaud.

The Senate passed its budget two months ago, after 50 hours of debate and an all-night series of 70 amendment votes. The next step was to send members to a House-Senate conference committee, but the Republicans held that up, arguing that before the conference committee could work on an agreement, the Senate should decide what the agreement would say.

The obstructionists’ great fear — I swear to you this is true — is that if the House and Senate conferees get together, the Republicans from the House will be so overwhelmed by the charm and power of the Senate Democrats that they’ll agree to a grand bargain that includes raising the debt ceiling.

“Let me be clear. I don’t trust the Republicans,” said Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican.

This has been going on for ages. Recently, a couple of the Republican senators — John McCain and Susan Collins — demanded that their colleagues stop stalling and follow the rules. This could be a plus for my argument, since half of that little rebellion is a woman.

But it also brings up a second possibility, that if the Senate is inching slightly closer to the middle, it’s because many of the Republicans are beginning to reject Tea Party extremism due to their hatred of Ted Cruz.

“It has been suggested that those of us who are fighting to defend liberty, fighting to turn around the out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt in this country, fighting to defend the Constitution — it has been suggested that we are wacko birds,” Cruz said proudly. “Well, if that is the case, I will suggest to my friend from Arizona there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected.”

Actually, no student of the Senate has ever suggested a wacko bird shortage.

Cruz is aligned with other young Tea Party Republicans, including Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky. They’re all very conservative and very talkative, but senators target Cruz as the one who just goes on and on and on and on.

He’s definitely the person responsible for bringing back the maverick version of John McCain. You will remember McCain the campaign finance reformer who kept co-sponsoring bills about global warming with Joe Lieberman. The one John Kerry thought about making his running mate before Kerry stumbled on the truly exceptional alternative of John Edwards.

The maverick McCain evolved into John McCain, terrible presidential candidate, and then John McCain, terrified right-wing Senate re-election candidate. The sullen, superpartisan version was bitter about losing the presidency to a cocky young whippersnapper like Barack Obama. But now McCain sees an Obama who has become winningly gray-haired and beleaguered. While in his place there is Ted Cruz, who is younger and cockier and a trillion times more irritating.

“When I travel across the state of Texas, men and women stop me all the time, and say: ‘Enough of the games. Go up there, roll up your sleeves, work with each other and fix the problem,’ ” Cruz lectured his colleagues this week, while he was engaged in stopping the budget process dead in its tracks for the ninth straight time.

So, people, who do you think has been more helpful in edging the Senate toward a pinch of progress? The women or Ted Cruz? One strives for collegiality by holding regular bipartisan dinners. One called his colleagues “squishes” for opposing a gun control filibuster.

I’m sticking with the girls. “Women seem to know how to work in a way that at least moves the process,” said Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the new chair of Appropriations. If you can agree on how to proceed, then maybe someday you get some progress.

On the other hand, Ted Cruz has memorized the Constitution.

Well, at least the Second Amendment, or parts thereof.  You know, omitting the bit about “well regulated…”

Krugman’s blog, 5/23/13

There were two posts yesterday.  The first was “Elementary, My Dear Watanabe-san (Somewhat Wonkish):”

OK, sorry about the bad translingual joke. But I thought it might be interesting to try doing a bit of deductive analysis on the sudden 7 percent plunge in the Nikkei.

One important thing to bear in mind, when it comes to big financial market moves, is that there may be no fundamental explanation at all. I’m old enough to remember the 1987 stock crash, which was followed by many theories about which policy move might have been responsible. As it happened, however, Robert Shiller managed to do a real-time survey as the market was plunging, and found essentially nobody mentioning any of the reasons later given for the selling wave. Instead, everyone said that they were selling because … prices were falling.

Still, to the extent that there is some fundamental story, what clues would we look for? And the answer, surely, is to ask what was happening in other markets, especially bonds and currencies.

Let me give you three different stories, each of which could explain a Nikkei plunge:

1. Fears about weak Japanese and Asian growth.
2. Fears about Japanese debt– the bond vigilantes have finally arrived.
3. Fears about the resolution of the Bank of Japan, its willingness to persist in very expansionary monetary policy for a long time.

All of these imply a fall in stocks; but they have different implications for bond and currency markets.

Story 1 should mean a fall in Japanese interest rates, since weaker growth should imply looser money for longer. Indeed, the recent runup in Japanese stocks and interest rates have gone hand in hand, suggesting that what we’ve been seeing is basically rising optimism. (Many of us have used similar arguments to wave away the claims that debt fears are driving occasional upticks in US rates). But in this case Japanese interest rates went basically nowhere.

Story 2 should have seen bond rates rising sharply, which they didn’t. Also, it should have meant a weakening in the yen — which actually rose significantly. So, not the bond vigilantes.

What about story 3? The impact of expected future monetary policy on long-term interest rates is ambiguous — rates might rise because they expect the BoJ to tighten, or fall because they fear that it will fail to end deflation. But worry about the BoJ’s resolve should have a clear impact on the yen, which should strengthen — which it did.

So to the extent that this wasn’t just markets doing their occasional panic thing, it looks like a sudden outbreak of concern about whether the Bank of Japan has really changed as much as it seems.

The second post of the day was “It’s Not About You:”

Brad DeLong and Dan Drezner wearily continue the policing of Michael Kinsley. I’ll leave it in their hands. But may I say that there is a serious pundit lesson here — namely, that it’s not about you.

Mike Kinsley wonders why people are acting as if he said something really stupid, and attributes it to the legions of Krugman “attack dogs” (Drezner, in particular, must be feeling amazed at that characterization), and/or some form of political correctness. He doesn’t consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, people are acting that way because he did, in fact, say something really stupid.

Look, the debate over economic policy in these terrible times is (a) hugely important (b) the subject of a large amount of hard work, both theoretical and empirical. If you want to barge into this debate expressing views based on some combination of your personal prejudices, what you think you remember about the 1970s, and what you presume must be the motives of other people, that is of course your right; but you don’t have the right to act surprised and affronted if people who have been doing their homework respond both by mocking your ignorance and by lamenting your unhelpfulness.

And if this makes you feel bad, so? Again, this isn’t about you.

PS: And for those wondering why I didn’t post more today — well, that was about me, mainly being caught first in a torrential downpour that left me looking like a drowned rat, then being stuck for a looong time on a #2 train that wasn’t going anywhere.

 

Krugman, solo

I announce unto you a great joy — Bobo is off today.  Prof. Krugman, in “Japan the Model,” says Japan appears to be turning around its economy. Could its economic experiment be the last, best hope for recovery for the rest of the world?  Here he is:

A generation ago, Japan was widely admired — and feared — as an economic paragon. Business best sellers put samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese management; thrillers by the likes of Michael Crichton portrayed Japanese corporations as unstoppable juggernauts rapidly consolidating their domination of world markets.

Then Japan fell into a seemingly endless slump, and most of the world lost interest. The main exceptions were a relative handful of economists, a group that happened to include Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and yours truly. These Japan-obsessed economists viewed the island nation’s economic troubles, not as a demonstration of Japanese incompetence, but as an omen for all of us. If one big, wealthy, politically stable country could stumble so badly, they wondered, couldn’t much the same thing happen to other such countries?

Sure enough, it both could and did. These days we are, in economic terms, all Japanese — which is why the ongoing economic experiment in the country that started it all is so important, not just for Japan, but for the world.

In a sense, the really remarkable thing about “Abenomics” — the sharp turn toward monetary and fiscal stimulus adopted by the government of Prime Minster Shinzo Abe — is that nobody else in the advanced world is trying anything similar. In fact, the Western world seems overtaken by economic defeatism.

In America, for example, there are still more than four times as many long-term unemployed workers as there were before the economic crisis, but Republicans only seem to want to talk about fake scandals. And, to be fair, it has also been a long time since President Obama said anything forceful publicly about job creation.

Still, at least we’re growing. Europe’s economy is back in recession, and it has actually grown a bit less over the past six years than it did between 1929 and 1935; meanwhile, it keeps hitting new highs for unemployment. Yet there is no hint of a major change in policy. At best, we may be looking at a slight relaxation of the savage austerity programs Brussels and Berlin are imposing on debtor nations.

It would be easy for Japanese officials to make the same excuses for inaction that we hear all around the North Atlantic: they are hamstrung by a rapidly aging population; the economy is weighed down by structural problems (and Japan’s structural problems, especially its discrimination against women, are legendary); debt is too high (far higher, as a share of the economy, than that of Greece). And in the past, Japanese officials have, indeed, been very fond of making such excuses.

The truth, however — a truth that the Abe government apparently gets — is that all of these problems are made worse by economic stagnation. A short-term boost to growth won’t cure all of Japan’s ills, but, if it can be achieved, it can be the first step toward a much brighter future.

So, how is Abenomics working? The safe answer is that it’s too soon to tell. But the early signs are good — and, no, Thursday’s sudden drop in Japanese stocks doesn’t change that story.

The good news starts with surprisingly rapid Japanese economic growth in the first quarter of this year — actually, substantially faster growth than that in the United States, while Europe’s economy continued to shrink. You never want to make too much of one quarter’s numbers, but that’s the kind of thing we want to see.

Meanwhile, Japanese stocks have soared, while the yen has fallen. And, in case you’re wondering, a weak yen is very good news for Japan because it makes the country’s export industries more competitive.

Some observers have raised the alarm over rising Japanese long-term interest rates, even though these rates are still less than 1 percent. But the combination of rising interest rates and rising stock prices suggests that both reflect an increase in optimism, not worries about Japanese solvency.

To be sure, Thursday’s sell-off in Japanese stocks put a small dent in that optimistic assessment. But stocks are still way up from last year, and I’m old enough to remember Black Monday in 1987, when U.S. stocks suddenly fell more than 20 percent for no obvious reason, and the ongoing economic recovery suffered not at all.

So the overall verdict on Japan’s effort to turn its economy around is so far, so good. And let’s hope that this verdict both stands and strengthens over time. For if Abenomics works, it will serve a dual purpose, giving Japan itself a much-needed boost and the rest of us an even more-needed antidote to policy lethargy.

As I said at the beginning, at this point the Western world has seemingly succumbed to a severe case of economic defeatism; we’re not even trying to solve our problems. That needs to change — and maybe, just maybe, Japan can be the instrument of that change.

Krugman’s blog, 5/22/13

There were two posts yesterday.  The first was “The Sloppiness Syndrome:”

So what is it with New Republic alumni? First Michael Kinsley, then Charles Lane, weigh in with defenses of austerity that aren’t just wrong, but painfully ill-informed. Kinsley not only makes a really bad analogy between current events and the 1970s, he seems not to know anything about what happened in the 1970s either. Lane attacks stimulus advocates for failing to address an argument that I actually discussed, at length, in my last column but one.

Whence cometh this epidemic of sheer sloppiness?

I’m not really sure, but in these cases I suspect it has a lot to do with the famed TNR/Slate premium on being “counterintuitive”, which in practice meant skewering supposed liberal pieties. (Kinsley himself joked that TNR should be renamed “Even the liberal New Republic”). And I find it curious that my own position in the discourse has undergone a kind of quantum tunneling: I seem to have transitioned from unserious pariah, unbeliever in the church of SimpsonBowles, to authority figure whom one can burnish one’s counterintuitive credentials by attacking, without ever having passed through the stage at which people say, “Hey, it looks as if he was right!”

And here’s my guess: if you went back through all the clever counterintuitiveness of past years, you’d find that a lot of it was every bit as sloppy and ill-informed as what we’re seeing now. The difference is the existence now of a policy blogosphere (in economics, of course, but in a number of disciplines too), which makes bluffing harder. In the past grotesquely ill-informed articles on, say, the Clinton health plan could sit out there for years, with only a handful of specialists aware of just how bad they were; now the pundit emperor’s nakedness is all over the web within days if not hours.

And if this leads to hurt feelings – well, this is not a game. We’re having a discussion about policies that affect tens of millions of people. And you have no business participating in this discussion if you’re so busy trying to sound clever that you can’t be bothered to do your homework.

The second post of the day was “The Joy of Term Papers:”

No, really (and mostly) — they’re the source of limited posting recently. While I wouldn’t mind having a bit, um, fewer papers to read, it’s a real joy when you get papers from young people that provide fresh thinking and tell you things you really didn’t know. And I had a bunch of those this semester.

It’s been a fine experience reading and grading. And thank God it’s over.

 

Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Blacks, Conservatives and Plantations” Mr. Blow has a question:  Why do Republicans keep endorsing African-American voices intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves?  In “Here Comes the Sun” Mr. Nocera says despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary presented by a Senate panel, Apple denies avoiding taxes.  Ms. Collins, in “Somebody Did Something,” says yes, people, it’s true. Immigration reform has advanced in the Senate. At least the committee didn’t repeal anything.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Why do Republicans keep endorsing the most extreme and hyperbolic African-American voices — those intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves? That idea, which only a black person could invoke without being castigated for the flagrant racial overtones, is a trope to which an increasingly homogeneous Republican Party seems to subscribe.

The most recent example of this is E.W. Jackson, who last weekend became the Virginia Republicans’ candidate for lieutenant governor in the state.

In a video posted to YouTube in 2012 titled “Bishop E.W. Jackson Message to Black Christians,” Jackson says:

“It is time to end the slavish devotion to the Democrat party. They have insulted us, used us and manipulated us. They have saturated the black community with ridiculous lies: ‘Unless we support the Democrat party, we will be returned to slavery. We will be robbed of voting rights. The Martin Luther King holiday will be repealed.’ They think we’re stupid and these lies will hold us captive while they violate everything we believe as Christians.”

He continues:

“Shame on us for allowing ourselves to be sold to the highest bidder. We belong to God. Our ancestors were sold against their will centuries ago, but we’re going to the slave market voluntarily today. Yes, it’s just that ugly.”

(Jackson also took swipes at the gay community and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan.)

The Democrat Plantation theology goes something like this: Democrats use the government to addict and incapacitate blacks by giving them free things — welfare, food stamps and the like. This renders blacks dependent on and beholden to that government and the Democratic Party.

This is not completely dissimilar from Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments, although he never mentioned race:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

Star Parker, a Scripps Howard syndicated columnist, failed Republican Congressional candidate and author of the book “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It,” argued in an article in 2009 on the conservative Web site Townhall:

“A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mind-sets from ‘How do I take care of myself?’ to ‘What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?’”

Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R. I., put it more bluntly in an editorial on the Ashbrook University Web site in 2002:

“For the modern liberal Democratic racist as for the old-fashioned one, blacks are simply incapable of freedom. They will always need Ol’ Massa’s help. And woe be to any African-American who wanders off of the Democratic plantation.”

That last bit hints at the other part of Democrat Plantation theology: that black Democrats and white liberals are equal enforcers of enslavement.

A 2010 unsigned article published on the Web site of the conservative weekly Human Events reads:

“If black Americans wish to be Democrats, that is their choice — or is it? Despite the fact that Democrats enjoy the support of over 90% of black America, the other 10%, those who dare to ‘stray from the plantation,’ have been routinely vilified — by other black Americans.”

The article continued:

“The not-so-subtle message? Support liberal dogma — or face social ostracism.”

Dr. Ben Carson, who delivered a speech blasting the president during the National Prayer breakfast this year and quickly became a darling of the right (The Wall Street Journal declared: “Ben Carson for President”), said of white liberals in a radio interview:

“They are the most racist people there are. Because they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

(Carson also got in trouble for comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. He later apologized for those comments, “if anybody was offended.”)

Unfortunately, the runaway slave image among many black Republican politicians is becoming ingrained and conservative audiences are applauding them for it.

Herman Cain, for example, built an entire presidential campaign on slave imagery.

C. Mason Weaver, a radio talk show host, failed Republican Congressional candidate from California and author of the book “It’s OK to Leave the Plantation,” said of President Obama at a 2009 Tea Party rally in Washington: “You thought he was saying was ‘hope and change’; he was saying was ‘ropes and chains,’ not ‘hope and change.’ ” Weaver continued: “Decide today if you’re going to be free or slaves. Decide today if you’re going to be a slave to your master or the master of your own destiny.” Weaver would repeat the “rope and chains” line on Fox and Friends that year.

The Rev. C.L. Bryant, a Tea Party member and occasional Fox News guest, even made a movie called “Runaway Slave,” in which he says that America should “run away from socialism, run from statism, run away from progressivism.”

While these politicians accuse the vast majority of African-Americans of being mindless drones of the Democrats, they are skating dangerously close to — if not beyond — the point where they become conservative caricatures.

The implication that most African-Americans can’t be discerning, that they can’t weigh the pros and cons of political parties and make informed decisions, that they are rendered servile in exchange for social services, is the highest level of insult. And black politicians are the ones Republicans are cheering on as they deliver it.

Now who, exactly, is being used here?

Next up is Mr. Nocera:

Among the many things Tim Cook apparently learned at the knee of Steve Jobs, during his long tenure as Apple’s No. 2, was how to create a “reality distortion field.” Or so it would appear after watching Cook, now Apple’s chief executive, testify on Tuesday at a Senate hearing on the company’s tax avoidance schemes.

Jobs was so persuasive that he could claim the sun was setting when it was actually rising, and everyone would nod in agreement. On Tuesday, despite the overwhelming evidence presented by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that Apple engaged in dubious tax avoidance gimmicks, Cook claimed that Apple never resorted to tax gimmickry. Even though the company appears to pay about 10 percent of its pretax income in taxes — when the federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent — Cook said, “We pay all the taxes we owe — every single dollar.” He added that Apple had never shifted any of its American profits to an offshore tax haven when, in fact, that is basically what it has done, routing tens of billions in pretax profits to a shell corporation in Ireland that exists solely to avoid taxes in the United States. He even said that the low taxes Apple pays overseas is on the profits of its overseas sales. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was a flat-out lie.

In other words, Cook spent Tuesday claiming that the sun was setting when it was actually rising, and, predictably, by the time the hearing had ended, most of the senators were agreeing with him. Senator John McCain, the committee’s ranking Republican, who had earlier labeled Apple “a tax avoider,” was soon swooning over Apple’s “incredible legacy.”

Indeed, Apple’s fabulous success over the past decade or so — its creation of the iPads and iPhones that the world lusts over — is a large part of the reason it always gets the benefit of the doubt, whether deserved or not. Two years ago, when David Kocieniewski of The Times reported on General Electric’s tax-avoidance prowess, a storm of protest resulted. Last year, however, when Kocieniewski and Charles Duhigg wrote about Apple’s tax avoidance schemes as part of a series about the company that won a Pulitzer Prize, it was greeted mainly with yawns. Nobody really wants to hear anything bad about Apple.

Yet as documented both by The Times and the Senate subcommittee, Apple is as much an innovator in tax avoidance as it is in technology. Take, for instance, a scheme known as The Double Irish, which it largely invented and which many American companies have since replicated. This strategy, which was the primary focus of Tuesday’s hearing, involves setting up a shell subsidiary in an offshore tax haven — a k a Ireland — and transferring most of Apple’s intellectual property rights to the dummy subsidiary. The subsidiary, in turn, charges “royalties” that allows it to capture billions of dollars in what otherwise would be taxable profits in the United States. In Ireland, according to Apple, it pays an astonishing 2 percent in taxes, thanks to a deal it has with the government. (The Irish government denies giving Apple a special deal.)

Here is another whopper from Mr. Cook on Tuesday. He said that his company not only doesn’t violate the letter of the law, that it doesn’t even violate the spirit. He may be right on the first part, but he is wrong on the second. As the subcommittee’s chairman, Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, pointed out to me on Wednesday, one of the main goals of American corporate tax policy is to tax profits in the jurisdiction where they are produced.

“That intellectual property and patents are the crown jewels of the company,” Levin said. “The Irish subsidiary had nothing to do with creating those crown jewels. It has no employees. It has no offices. Yet most of Apple’s profits are now offshore because they were able to utilize a shift of their intellectual property to a tax haven.”

(Question for the government of Ireland: Do you really want your country to be known as an offshore tax haven? Indeed, at a time when your citizens are dealing with the pain of an austerity program, how can you justify allowing Apple to pay virtually no taxes on a subsidiary established solely to avoid taxes in the United States? Just wondering.)

Levin has proposed a bill that would curb the most blatant abuses of the tax code like the Double Irish. Part of the purpose of the hearing was to bring these abuses to light and generate bipartisan support for closing them. When I asked Levin whether he felt that the subcommittee had made a mistake in singling out Apple, given its Teflon reputation, he said no. “You can’t ignore the most blatant examples just because it is a popular company,” he said.

He’s right about that, of course. But that’s only obvious if you are willing to say the sun is rising when Apple says it is not.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Whenever the world of Washington seems hopeless, someone will point out that the Senate Judiciary Committee did a good job on immigration reform.

That’s it? Yeah, pretty much.

Immigration reform has been the 2013 bipartisan bright spot in the Senate, unless you were really moved by the day they voted to debate gun control before killing all the gun control plans. The committee members cheerfully plowed through 300-odd proposed amendments, while taking turns telling which country their great-grandfather came from. There was, of course, a lot of disagreement, although almost everybody seemed to enjoy slapping down ideas offered by Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

Mainstream Republicans have been super-energized to do immigration reform ever since the Hispanic vote went against them in the last election. Democracy does work. If somebody came up with a dramatic poll showing that all the people with diabetes, asthma and chronic back problems had voted against Mitt Romney, there would no longer be a problem getting funding for health care reform.

High points in the committee’s long slog toward passage included a proposal from Tea Party icon Mike Lee of Utah to exempt employers of “cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governesses, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use” from checking to make sure their help had the proper legal status. It didn’t go anywhere, but if you happen to run into Lee, feel free to say: “The butler did it.”

The most painful low point in the committee’s deliberations came at the end, when the Democrats gave up on an amendment allowing same-sex spouses the same right as heterosexuals to apply for permanent resident status for their partners. It’s not every day when you hear a senator announce that he had decided to support a move that involved “rank discrimination.” But the Republicans who were needed to get an immigration bill through the Senate had made it supremely clear that if any hint of gay marriage entered the legislation, they were going to take their toys and go home.

Decide for yourself how you feel about this one, people. Stand up for equality or finally get a major bill through the Senate? Defend equality or cave in and hope that the Supreme Court bails you out when it rules on the Defense of Marriage Act next month?

It is, at minimum, a useful reminder of what lawmaking looked like back in the days when the two parties made deals and we complained that nobody was sticking to their principles. Back to the can-do days when senators routinely said things like Senator Orrin Hatch’s explanation of his thinking on immigration: “I’m going to vote this bill out of committee because I’ve committed to do that.”

The bill, which would give millions of undocumented residents a path toward eventual citizenship, now goes to the full Senate, where it actually looks as though it’s going to pass. Any further progress would require cooperation from the House of Representatives, the circle of hell where the damned are condemned to spend eternity voting to repeal the health care reform law.

Perhaps you missed the one last week. Let me summarize:

■ “The Obamacare law must be ripped out by its roots!”

■ “The 37th time! The 37th time!”

■ “A malignant tumor that’s metastasizing on America’s liberty!”

■ “We have spent over 56 hours on the floor debating repeal of the law of the land!”

The House Republican leadership would probably rather have been working on something else. But the newer members whined that they’d hardly had any opportunities to vote to repeal Obamacare at all. “It sends a great statement back to our district,” said Representative Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, who many people enjoy quoting because they like saying Ted Yoho.

Also, it’s hard for the Republicans to agree among themselves about anything else. One influential conservative organization recently urged Speaker John Boehner to drop the whole legislation idea completely and just hold committee hearings about the I.R.S. scandal and Benghazi forever.

“Recent events have rightly focused the nation’s attention squarely on the actions of the Obama administration,” argued the Heritage Action for America. “It is incumbent upon the House of Representatives to conduct oversight hearings on those actions, but it would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican conference.”

We really hate it when they get imprudent.

Krugman’s blog, 5/21/13

There were two posts yesterday.  The first was “Sharing Abuse Fairly:”

Jeff Frankel sorta-kinda defends Reinhart-Rogoff, and says that Alberto Alesina is the bigger austerity villain, having failed to receive his “fair share of abuse”. Brad DeLong weighs in to say that R-R continue to have a lot to answer for.

Brad is right about that. In particular, Reinhart-Rogoff continue, to this day, to insinuate that the statement that “countries with debt above 90 percent of GDP tend to have slower growth than those with debt below 90 percent of GDP” — which is true, somewhat — is equivalent to the statement that there is a threshold at 90 percent at which bad things happen. This just isn’t true; it wouldn’t be true even if the causality weren’t largely from slow growth to high debt rather than the other way around.

The class of countries with debt>90 includes countries with debt a LOT more than 90; the policy question is whether there is a large dropoff as you go from a bit below 90 to a bit above. R-R keep implying that there is; the data say, very clearly, that there isn’t.

That said, Frankel is right about the need to abuse Alesina too. And I’ve been doing it! (That’s largely what the “confidence fairy” was about!) A fair bit in the recent NYBooks piece, many times on this blog. Mark Blyth’s Austerity focuses on Alesina a lot; Mike Konczal and colleagues at the Roosevelt Institute, and many more, have weighed in.

True, A-A hasn’t made it to Colbert. But their role in this disaster has not been forgotten.

The second post of the day was “Perma-Stimulus, Again:”

Jonathan Chait tells me that the new anti-Keynesian paladin is James Buchanan, who supposedly showed that stimulus, however worthy, can never be reversed. The elevation of Buchanan comes from Charles Lane at the Washington Post, who name-checks me as one of those naive Keynesians who doesn’t get it (and misuses the “in the long run we are all dead” line to boot).

But wait: haven’t I dealt with this claim before? Why, yes — in a column published in the Times just two weeks ago, which was largely devoted to this very issue:

But there is, I believe, a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future.

So now seems like a good time to point out that this cynicism, which sounds realistic and worldly-wise, is actually sheer fantasy. Ending stimulus has never been a problem — in fact, the historical record shows that it almost always ends too soon. And in America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception — namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power.

…

Incidentally, foreign experience follows the same pattern. You often hear Japan described as a country that has pursued never-ending fiscal stimulus. In reality, it has engaged in stop-go policies, increasing spending when the economy is weak, then pulling back at the first sign of recovery (and thereby pushing itself back into recession).

So the whole notion of perma-stimulus is fantasy posing as hardheaded realism.

This argument is then backed by various pieces of evidence.

So I answered this latest anti-Keynesian claim before it was even made. Oh, and I was under the impression that if you’re going to characterize a named writer’s views, and in particular to make claims about what that writer doesn’t get, you might want to read a few things said writer has written — say, his last two columns. But I guess I don’t fully understand the rules here.

 

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo is being a TV critic today.  She has a question in “Serving Up Schlock:”  Remember the “mad as hell” scene in “Network”? Something about the new offerings for the fall TV season brought that to mind.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Sanliurfa, Turkey.  In “Tell Me How This Ends” he says a trip to Yemen, Syria and Turkey is illuminating, but also raises many questions.  Here’s MoDo:

Networks are generally leery of shows that are set in the past.

TV executives think younger viewers don’t care about history. And they’re always on the hunt for the younger demo, working on the mistaken premise that millennials buy more and change brands more often than profligate and fickle baby boomers.

Or maybe networks are simply operating on the same principle that drives romance and commerce: the more elusive the prize, the more it’s worth.

It’s funny that networks are afraid of the past, given that they’re stuck in it. What Paddy Chayefsky could do with that paradox.

It turns out that Washington isn’t the only place where ideas go to die.

TV honchos cling to outmoded programming traditions even as many younger Americans, gorging on a movable feast of platforms, are losing the habit of turning on the TV, and even as top talent peels off to enjoy the freedom of cable and imaginative hubs like Amazon, Hulu, YouTube and Netflix, which is crackling with “House of Cards” and a fresh season of “Arrested Development.”

Networks still prefer to play it safe with likable characters, not darker ones like Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, Nicholas Brody and face-chewing zombies. Watching the derivative and uninspiring fare served up last week by the networks during their previews to woo advertisers, I was flummoxed at the lack of creativity and modernity. Rod Serling had more originality on a sick day than all the networks’ high-priced talent combined.

Serling once complained that TV drama “must walk tiptoe and in agony lest it offend some cereal buyer from a given state below the Mason-Dixon.” But the networks of the 21st century don’t seem hungry to push the envelope, despite their ever-shrinking audiences.

I asked one media big shot what he watches. He replied, “Homeland,” “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men” — all cable hits — failing to mention any of his own network’s shows. Then why, I wondered, can’t networks show more verve?

“They’re enslaved to tradition,” he said. “It’s silly. They should be bolder and more aggressive, edgier and sexier, but there’s a lot of timidity.”

So NBC, which some weeks finished last behind Univision, offers us Blair Underwood in “Ironside,” a remake of its old series with Raymond Burr; Minnie Driver in “About a Boy,” a redo of the movie based on Nick Hornby’s novel; James Spader in “The Blacklist” as yet another variation on Hannibal Lecter, a suave criminal mastermind strapped to a chair who will only cooperate with the F.B.I. if he works with a young, pretty female agent; and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in “Dracula,” which doesn’t really count as new blood.

Judd Apatow and Kristen Wiig turned Melissa McCarthy into an outsize star in the movie “Bridesmaids,” so naturally lots of writers raced to produce pilots with plus-size women straining to be funny. Rebel Wilson, the talented, heavyset Aussie actress who played Wiig’s obnoxious roommate in “Bridesmaids,” will star in ABC’s “Super Fun Night,” about three nerdy girlfriends who aim for madcap Friday nights.

“Back in the Game” is about a young blonde who joins a beer-guzzling former baseball player in coaching an underdog Little League team. “Bad News Bears” redux. “Resurrection” is about dead relatives popping up on the doorstep — zombies with better skin.

At least ABC passed on “Westside,” Romeo and, like, Juliet set in Venice, Calif., and “Middle Age Rage,” which the network describes as “a middle-aged mother who is fed up with feeling invisible and begins to speak and demand the respect she feels she’s earned.”

CBS proffers “Reckless,” described as a sultry legal show set in Charleston, S.C., with a comely Yankee litigator clashing over a police scandal with a Southern city attorney “as they struggle to hide their intense attraction.” I saw this when the city attorney was a New Orleans cop and it was called “The Big Easy,” starring Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid.

CBS has “Bad Teacher,” based on the 2011 Cameron Diaz movie, and “Friends With Better Lives,” the plot of which sounds just like the 2006 Nicole Holofcener movie, “Friends With Money.” (CBS probably felt brave passing on a third “NCIS.”) The one retread that might have been fun, “Beverly Hills Cop,” with Eddie Murphy himself dropping by in guest spots, CBS passed on.

Fox has “Enlisted,” a wacky comedy about three brothers in the Army in Florida, which smacks of Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and John Candy in “Stripes,” even down to what sounds like the same music. J.J. Abrams’s “Almost Human” looks like a hand-me-down blend of “RoboCop” and “Blade Runner.”

Even Fox’s freshest ideas are antique: a show about a hunky Ichabod Crane called “Sleepy Hollow” and “24” with Kiefer Sutherland, but this time squeezed into 12 episodes.

Doing a comedy turn at the ABC upfronts at Lincoln Center, Jimmy Kimmel mocked the advertisers for spending billions on dated dreckitude, noting that he also had a few things for sale: “This is an H.P. printer, inkjet color copier — $20, no power cord,” and “I’ve got three parrot cages available — make me an offer.”

He had the most trenchant comment about the quality of the new season’s pilots, slyly observing: “One of the shows previewed today was written by a third-grade class. Your challenge tonight is to figure out which one it was.”

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I’ve been traveling to Yemen, Syria and Turkey to film a documentary on how environmental stresses contributed to the Arab awakening. As I looked back on the trip, it occurred to me that three of our main characters — the leaders of the two Yemeni villages that have been fighting over a single water well and the leader of the Free Syrian Army in Raqqa Province, whose cotton farm was wiped out by drought — have 36 children among them: 10, 10 and 16.

It is why you can’t come away from a journey like this without wondering not just who will rule in these countries but how will anyone rule in these countries?

Of course, we should hope for those with sincere democratic aspirations to prevail, but clearly theirs is not the only vision being put on the table. These aspiring democrats are having to compete with Islamist, sectarian and tribal opposition groups, which also have deep roots in these societies. But no matter which trend triumphs, the real issue here is whether 50 years of population explosion, environmental mismanagement and educational stagnation have made some of these countries ungovernable by any group or ideology.

In Egypt, Yemen or Syria, it is common to see primary-school classes of 60 to 70 kids with one undertrained teacher, no computers and no science instruction. How are the 36 kids whose three fathers I met going to have a chance in a world where not only are robots replacing manual blue-collar workers but software is increasingly replacing routine white-collar jobs — and where some of them can’t go back to the family farm because the water and topsoil have been depleted?

And then I go across the Turkish border to Tel Abyad, in northeastern Syria, and I see broken buildings, electricity lines on the ground, half-finished homes and a gaping hole in a grain storage tower, and I think: Not only are they behind, but this war is still destroying what little they have left. They are in a hole and still digging.

The only way for these countries to catch up is by people uniting to mobilize all their strength. It is for Sunnis, Christians and Alawites in Syria to work together; for the tribes in Yemen and Libya to work together; for the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists and liberals in Egypt to do so as well, particularly in implementing the proposed International Monetary Fund economic reforms. In today’s globalized world, you fall behind faster than ever if you are not building the education, infrastructure and economic foundation to take advantage of this world — but you catch up faster if you do.

But to pull together requires trust — that intangible thing that says you can rule over me even though you come from a different tribe, sect or political party — and that is what is missing here. In the absence of any Nelson Mandela-like leaders able and eager to build trust, I don’t see how any of these awakenings succeed. I keep thinking about the Free Syrian Army commander, whom I quoted on Sunday, introducing me to his leadership team: “My nephew, my cousin, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my son, my cousin …” What does that tell you?

We can only properly answer the question — should we be arming the Syrian rebels? — if we first answer what kind of Syria do we want to see emerge and what will it take, beyond arms, to get there?

If we want Bashar al-Assad’s regime to be toppled and pluralistic democracy to emerge in Syria, then we not only need to arm the rebels but we need to organize an international peacekeeping force to enter Syria as soon as the regime falls to help manage the transition. Otherwise, when Assad is toppled, there will be at least two more wars in Syria. First will be a war between Sunnis and Alawites, the sect that Assad represents. The Alawites will fight to defend their perks and turf. After that, there will be a war within the opposition — between the Islamists and more secular fighting forces that have very different visions of a future Syria. Only an outside peacekeeping force could make up for the lack of trust and shared vision and try to forge a new Syria. And it would be a very, very long haul.

If our goal is to arm the rebels just to serve our strategic interests — which are to topple the Assad regime and end the influence of Iran and Hezbollah in Damascus and not care what comes next — then we need to be ready for the likely fragmentation of Syria into three zones: one Sunni, one Alawite and one Kurdish.

That might eventually solve the trust and civil war problems, as everyone would be living “with their own,” but I am not sure it would better enable Syrians to address their development challenges.

A third option would be to arm the rebels just to ensure a stalemate — in the hope that the parties might eventually get exhausted enough to strike a deal on their own. But, again, I find it hard to see how any deal that might set Syria on the long, difficult path to a decent, inclusive political system could be implemented without outside help on the ground to referee.

So let’s do something new: think two steps ahead. Before we start sending guns to more people, let’s ask ourselves for what exact ends we want those guns used and what else would be required of them and us to realize those ends?

Krugman’s blog, 5/20/13

There were five posts yesterday.  The first was “German Wages and Portuguese Competitiveness (A Bit Wonkish):”

There’s a three-cornered debate among Ryan Avent, Tyler Cowen, and Karl Smith over the extent to which a more expansionary ECB policy would help the European periphery.

I very much agree with Avent and Smith that Cowen, who worries that such a policy would largely lead to inflation in Germany rather than a boom in Portugal, is completely missing the point; that’s a feature, not a bug.

But what really puzzles me about Cowen’s exposition here is his misplaced focus on the extent to which Portugal and Germany are in direct competition with each other, or to which Germany is Portugal’s main export market. This is very nearly irrelevant — because the point is that Germany and Portugal, for better or (mainly) worse, now share a currency, and what happens in Germany very much affects the value of that currency relative to other currencies.

Cowen writes that rising wages in Germany

solves (at best) only one of the core problems of the eurozone, namely incorrect relative prices between Portugal and Germany. It helps less with the “Portuguese nominal wages are too high” problem …

OK, stop right there. When you say “Portuguese nominal wages are too high”, you have to explain, too high relative to what? As Rudi Dornbusch always used to say, it takes two nominals to make a real.

And the answer, clearly, is “too high relative to German wages”. What else could it be?

But, you say, Portugal doesn’t compete that much with Germany. Ahem. Suppose that I could wave a magic wand (or play a few notes on a a Magic Flute) and suddenly increase all German wages by 20 percent. What do you think would happen to the value of the euro against the dollar and other currencies? It would drop a lot, yes? And Portuguese exports would become a lot more competitive everywhere, including non-German and indeed non-Euro destinations.

I guess I thought this was obvious. Apparently not.

Again, as Ryan says, the crucial difference between German/ Portuguese economic relations and, say, US/ El Salvador (whoops: some central American countries have dollarized. But that was their choice, not part of a grand project like the euro) relations is that Germany and Portugal share a currency. This creates obligations for Germany, whether it likes them or not.

The next post of the day was “Macoeconomic Machismo:”

Atrios, weighing in on the Kinsley Kontroversy, suggests that the evident urge to make Someone Suffer — Someone Else, of course — reflects sadism. But I don’t think that’s right. Lack of compassion, sure; an inability to imagine what it must be like for someone less fortunate than oneself and one’s friends, definitely. But I think that the linked Scott Lemieux post, which equates the austerian fixation on stagflation with the neocon fixation on Munich, is much closer to the mark.

It was obvious during the runup to the Iraq war that what was going on in the minds of many hawks — and not just the neocons — was not so much a deep desire to drop lots of bombs and kill lots of people (although they were OK with that) as a deep desire to be seen as people who were willing to Do What Has to be Done. Men who have never risked, well, anything relished the chance to look in the mirror and see Winston Churchill looking back.

Actually, I suspect that even the torture thing had less to do with sadism than with the desire to look tough.

And the austerian impulse is pretty much the same thing, except that in this case the mild-mannered pundits want to look in the mirror and see Paul Volcker.

Much of the problem in trying to stop the march to war was precisely the fear of many pundits that they would be seen as weak and, above all, not Serious if they objected. Austerity has been very much the same thing — and again, it’s not just the right-wingers who are afflicted.

Let me illustrate that point with two parallel diagnoses of economic crisis, 78 years apart. The first is from John Maynard Keynes, The Great Slump of 1930; the second from Barack Obama’s first inaugural, in January 2009. Keynes:

This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men’s devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life—high, I mean, compared with, say, twenty years ago—and will soon learn to afford a standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time—perhaps for a long time.

Obama:

We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.

Do you see where it goes wrong? Most of the way through, Obama is getting it right: this is a “colossal muddle”, a technical problem that needs fixing. But then he suddenly swerves into the language of Very Serious People, talking about the need to make unpleasant decisions (which is always there, but if anything less so in a depression).

I was very upset about this at the time, but not upset enough — for there, right at the beginning, was the austerian temptation, adulterating the message of the man who should have been that temptation’s fiercest opponent.

So if you like, the problem is Seriousness rather than sadism. On foreign policy, it’s always 1938; on economic policy, it’s always 1979. And the colossal muddle goes on.

The third post yesterday was “Dead Ingot Bounce.”  (That phrase does make me chortle.)

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had been getting some grief from goldbugs, who were reveling in the fact that gold went up some after I wrote about its fading appeal. I expressed skepticism — as you always should after any short-term price movement, especially in an asset with as much emotional freight as gold — and suggested that it might be a dead ingot bounce. Hmmm:

Yes, I know gold had a huge rise in previous years. I also know that there may be more bounces ahead. But mostly I just want to claim the phrase …

Fourth up yesterday was “Where Are The Deficit Celebrations?”:

For three years and more Beltway politics has been all about the deficit. Urgent action was needed to avert crisis. A Grand Bargain absolutely had to be reached. Fix the Debt, now now now!

So where are the celebrations now that the debt issue looks, if not solved, at least greatly mitigated? And it’s not just recovering revenues: health costs, the biggest driver of long-run spending, have slowed dramatically.

What we’re getting from the deficit scolds, however, are at best grudging admissions that things may look a bit less dire — if not expressions of regret that the public seems insufficiently alarmed.

Jamelle Bouie gets at a large part of it by noting what was obvious all along: for many deficit scolds, it was never really about the debt, it was about using deficits as a way to attack the social safety net. Deficits may have come down, but not the way they were supposed to — hey, we were supposed to be kicking 65 and 66 year-olds off Medicare, not doing something so goody-goody as managing costs better.

There is, however, a secondary factor: think about the personal career incentives of the professional deficit scolds. You’re Bowles/Simpson, with a lucrative and ego-satisfying business of going around the country delivering ominous talks about The Deficit; you’re an employee of one of the many Pete Peterson front groups; and now, all of a sudden, the deficit is receding, and you had nothing to do with it. It’s a disaster!

And so the deficit progress must be minimized and bad-mouthed.

Of course.  Because it makes it harder to punish the olds, the poors and the browns…  The last post of the day was “The Theory of Interstellar Finance:”

The theory of interstellar trade is a well-understood topic, with an extensive literature consisting of one paper (pdf) I wrote in 1978. Interstellar finance, however, is less well covered.

That’s all about to change, however. I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.

It’s also a fantastic novel.

Thanks for the tip!  I love Stross’ work.

Brooks and Bruni

Bobo has so many hats!  Today he’s wearing his linguist hat.  In “What Our Words Tell Us” he informs us that gradual shifts in language use over the centuries reflect tectonic shifts in culture.  It’s amazing what you can glean from Google, and of course there’s no link to the “study” he mentions…  In “One School’s Catholic Teaching” Mr. Bruni says with just the briefest acknowledgement of her life partner, Carla Hale lost the job she’d loved for more than 18 years.  Here’s Bobo:

About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The database doesn’t tell you how the words were used; it just tells you how frequently they were used. Still, results can reveal interesting cultural shifts. For example, somebody typed the word “cocaine” into the search engine and found that the word was surprisingly common in the Victorian era. Then it gradually declined during the 20th century until around 1970, when usage skyrocketed.

I’d like to tell a story about the last half-century, based on studies done with this search engine. The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.

That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.

The second element of the story is demoralization. A study by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir found that general moral terms like “virtue,” “decency” and “conscience” were used less frequently over the course of the 20th century. Words associated with moral excellence, like “honesty,” “patience” and “compassion” were used much less frequently.

The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent.

Usage of humility words like “modesty” and “humbleness” dropped by 52 percent. Usage of compassion words like “kindness” and “helpfulness” dropped by 56 percent. Meanwhile, usage of words associated with the ability to deliver, like “discipline” and “dependability” rose over the century, as did the usage of words associated with fairness. The Kesebirs point out that these sorts of virtues are most relevant to economic production and exchange.

Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine. He found further evidence of the two elements I’ve mentioned. On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”

Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.

So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.

This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.

Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here. But these gradual shifts in language reflect tectonic shifts in culture. We write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni, datelined Columbus, Ohio:

No one at the Catholic high school that fired Carla Hale in March claimed that she was anything less than a terrific physical education teacher and coach, devoted to the kids and adored by many of them.

No one accused her of bringing her personal life into the gym or onto the fields. By nature she’s private. And she loved her job too much to risk it that way.

But she lost it nonetheless, and the how is as flabbergasting as the why is infuriating.

Rather suddenly, her mother died, and an hour afterward, she and her brother numbly went through the paces of a standard obituary, listing survivors. Her brother included his wife. So Carla included her partner, Julie, whom her mother had known well and loved. Leaving Julie out would have been unthinkable, though Carla didn’t really think it through at the time. Her grief was still raw.

A parent of one of the school’s students spotted the obituary, and wrote an anonymous letter to the school and to the Diocese of Columbus, saying that they couldn’t allow a woman like Carla to educate Catholic children.

So they don’t, not anymore. In a termination notice, the principal explained that Carla’s “spousal relationship violates the moral laws of the Catholic Church.” That was the sum of the stated grievance against her, and after more than 18 years at Bishop Watterson High School, Carla, 57, was done.

“The way it all came about was just so unfathomable,” she told me on Sunday. “An obituary?”

I met her and Julie, 48, in their house outside Columbus, where the front lawn was neatly tended, the refrigerator was plastered with photos of relatives, the chocolate lab dozed in his reserved spot on the sectional and Carla kept a box of tissues handy. Whenever she’s asked what her work meant to her, she cries.

“Every morning,” she said, “from the time you walked into the building, kids would be yelling down the hall, ‘Hey, Miss Hale, what are we going to do today?’ ‘Hey, Miss Hale, I remembered those shoes.’ It felt so comforting.” She had a sense of belonging. Of purpose.

Even now, after nearly two months of exile from the school, she’s still on what she calls “bell time.” If the clock on her kitchen wall says 10:45 a.m., the voice in her head says, “Fourth period.”

There’s so much in the media, and in this column, about the progress of gay rights, especially on the marriage front. But in the republic of Georgia just days ago, Orthodox priests led thousands of people in an antigay attack. In Greenwich Village, a young gay man was fatally shot in what’s been deemed a hate crime.

And at a kitchen table here in central Ohio, a typically cheerful woman dabbed her eyes and wondered aloud what she’d done wrong.

The answer is in one sense simple: she made a life with another woman. While the Catholic Church doesn’t condemn homosexuality per se, it considers any physical expression of it sinful. And Carla’s “public declaration of an extramarital relationship,” meaning the obituary, indicated that she was flouting Catholic tenets and thus breaching her contract, according to a statement the diocese e-mailed me.

But things get complicated when you consider the selectiveness of the church’s outrage, the capriciousness of its mercy.

Until public exposure shamed them, many church leaders protected priests whose sexual transgressions involved minors and were criminal.

Church leaders tolerate teachers at Catholic schools who are married with no kids or with few. Some are surely using artificial birth control, which the church officially opposes.

Besides which, Carla was guiding students through sit-ups, not psalms. The school hired her though she’s Methodist, not Catholic.

She was then married to a man, but they split and, more than a decade ago, she became involved with Julie.

Perhaps six colleagues met Julie over the years, though they probably weren’t the only ones aware of Carla’s sexual orientation. “I’m sure it was surmised: gym teacher, divorced, short hair, didn’t have a bow in it,” Carla said. “Come on.”

There was no discussion or upset, not until the anonymous letter.

Neither the federal government nor Ohio outlaws employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Columbus does, though whether it can be applied to religious groups is uncertain. Carla’s lawyer, Thomas Tootle, has filed a complaint with the city anyway.

It’s been a big story here, with thousands of people publicly expressing support for her. She’s moved but mortified. She didn’t seek and doesn’t enjoy the media attention.

“A lot of people want me to be bitter and go after the Catholic Church,” she said, adding that others want to cast her as a lesbian heroine. She just wants her job back, a recognition, she said, “that I’m a moral individual who happens to be gay.”